Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  "Do you feel contempt for me?" Hippolyte asked Prince Myshkin.

  "Why? Should I feel contempt because you suffered and continue to suffer more than we?"

  200

  Immortality

  "No, because I am not worthy of my suffering."

  I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontologi-cal proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect: the value of all values. That's why Myshkin admires all women who suffer. When he saw a photograph of Nastasia Filipovna for the first time, he said, "That woman must have suffered a great deal." Those words determined right from the start, even before we saw her on the stage of the novel, that Nastasia Filipovna stood far higher than all the others. "I am nothing, but you, you have suffered," said the bewitched Myshkin to Nastasia in the fifteenth chapter of the first part, and from that moment on he is lost.

  I said that Myshkin admired all women who suffered, but I could also turn this statement around: from the moment some woman pleased him, he imagined her suffering. And because he was incapable of keeping his thoughts to himself, he immediately made this known to the woman. Besides, it was an outstanding method of seduction (what a pity that Myshkin did not know how to make better use of it!), for if we say to any woman "You have suffered a great deal," it is as if we celebrated her soul, stroked it, lifted it high. Any woman is ready to tell us at such a moment, "Even though you still don't have my body, my soul already belongs to you!"

  Under Myshkin's gaze the soul grows and grows, it resembles a giant mushroom as high as a five-story building, it resembles a hot-air balloon about to rise into the sky with its crew. We have reached a phenomenon that I call hypertrophy of the soul.

  201

  12

  w

  hen Goethe received from Bettina the sketch for his monument, you may remember that he had a tear in his eye and he was certain that his inmost self was thereby letting him know the truth: Bettina truly loved him, and he had wronged her. He realized only later that the tear revealed no remarkable truth about Bettina's devotion but only the banal truth of his own vanity. He was ashamed for having once again given in to the demagogy of his own tears. Since turning fifty, he had had much experience with tears: every time somebody praised him or he was gratified by some beautiful or benevolent deed he had performed, his eyes grew moist. What is a tear? he asked himself, without ever finding the answer. But one thing was clear to him: a tear was suspiciously often provoked by the emotion brought on by Goethe's contemplation of Goethe.

  About a week after the terrible death of Agnes, Laura visited a despondent Paul.

  "Paul," she said, "we're alone in the world now."

  Paul's eyes grew moist, and he turned his head to hide his emotion from Laura.

  But it was precisely this movement of the head that induced Laura to grasp him firmly by the arm: "Don't cry, Paul!"

  Paul looked at Laura through his tears and saw that her eyes, too, were moist. He smiled and said in a faltering voice, "I'm not crying. You're crying."

  "If there is anything at all you need, Paul, you know that I am here, that you can count on me."

  And Paul answered, "I know."

  The tear in Laura's eye was the tear of emotion Laura felt over

  202

  Immortality

  Laura's determination to sacrifice her whole life to stand by the side of her deceased sister's husband.

  The tear in Paul's eye was a tear of emotion Paul felt over the faithfulness of Paul, who could never live with any other woman except the shadow of his dead wife, her likeness, her sister.

  And so one day they lay down together on the broad bed and the tear (the mercy of the tear) made them feel no sense of betrayal toward the deceased.

  The old art of erotic ambiguity came to their aid: they lay side by side not like husband and wife, but like siblings. Until now, Laura had been taboo for Paul; he probably had never connected her with any sexual imaginings, not even in some far corner of his mind. Now, he felt like her brother, who had to replace her lost sister. At the start, that made it morally possible for him to go to bed with her, and later it filled him with a totally unknown excitement: they knew everything about each other (like brother and sister), and what separated them was not the strangeness but prohibition; this prohibition had lasted twenty years and with the passage of time was becoming more and more insurmountable. Nothing was closer than the other's body. Nothing was more prohibited than the other's body. And so with an incestuous excitement (and with misty eyes) he began to make love to her, and he made love to her more wildly than he had ever done with anyone in his entire life.

  203

  13

  There are civilizations that have had greater architecture than Europe, and Greek tragedy will forever remain unsurpassed. However, no civilization has ever created such a miracle out of musical sounds as European music, with its thousand-year-old history and its wealth of forms and styles! Europe: great music and homo sentimentalis. Twins nurtured side by side in the same cradle.

  Music taught the European not only a richness of feeling, but also the worship of his feelings and his feeling self. After all, you are familiar with this situation: the violinist standing on the platform closes his eyes and plays the first two long notes. At that moment the listener also closes his eyes, feels his soul expanding in his breast, and says to himself: "How beautiful!" And yet he hears only two notes, which in themselves could not possibly contain anything of the composer's ideas, any creativity, in other words any art or beauty. But those two notes have touched the listener's heart and silenced his reason and aesthetic judgment. Mere musical sound performs approximately the same effect upon us as Myshkin's gaze fixed upon a woman. Music: a pump for inflating the soul. Hypertrophic souls turned into huge balloons rise to the ceiling of the concert hall and jostle each other in unbelievable congestion.

  Laura loved music sincerely and deeply; I recognize the precise significance of her love for Mahler: Mahler is the last great European composer who still appeals, naively and directly, to homo sentimentalis. After Mahler, feeling in music starts to become suspicious; Debussy wants to enchant us, not to move us, and Stravinsky is ashamed of emotion. Mahler is for Laura the ultimate composer, and when she hears loud rock music coming from Brigitte's room, her wounded love for

  204

  Immortality

  European music, vanishing in the din of electric guitars, drives her to fury. She gives Paul an ultimatum: either Mahler or rock; meaning: cither me or Brigittc.

  But how is one to choose between two equally unloved kinds of music? Rock is too loud for Paul (like Goethe, he has delicate ears), while Romantic music evokes in him feelings of anxiety. During the war, when everybody around him was disturbed by panicky reports,

  the tangos and waltzes usually played on the radio were replaced by

  minor-key chords of serious, solemn music; in the child's memory, these chords became forever engraved as harbingers of catastrophe.

  Later, he realized that the pathos of Romantic music united all Europe: it can be heard every time some statesman is murdered or war is declared, every time it is necessary to stuff people's heads with glory to make them die more willingly. Nations that tried to annihilate each other were filled with the identical fraternal emotion when they heard the thunder of Chopin's Funeral March or Beethoven's Eroica. Ah, if only it depended on Paul, the world could get along very well without rock and without Mahler. However, the two women did not permit him neutrality. They forced him to choose: between two kinds of music, between two women. And he didn't know what to do, because both women were equally dear to him.

  Yet the two women hated each other. Brigitte looked with painful sorrow at the white piano, which had served no function for years except as a makeshift shelf; it reminded her of Agnes, who out of love for her sister had pleaded with Brigitte to learn to play it. As soon as Agnes died, the piano c
ame to life and resounded every day. Brigitte hoped that furious rock would revenge her betrayed mother and chase the intruder from the house. When she realized that Laura was staying, she left herself. Rock was heard no more. Records revolved on the record player, Mahler's trombones rang through the room and tore at Paul's heart, still pining for his daughter. Laura approached Paul, grasped his head with both hands, and looked into his eyes. Then she said, "I'd like to give you a child." Both of them knew that doctors had already warned her a long time before not to have any children. That's why she added, "I am ready to do whatever is necessary."

  205

  MILAN KUNDERA

  It was summertime. Laura closed her shop and the two of them left for a two-week seaside vacation. The waves dashed against the shore and their call filled Paul's breast. The music of this element was the only kind that he loved passionately. He discovered with happy surprise that Laura merged with this music; the only woman in his life whom he found to resemble the sea; who was the sea.

  14

  206

  Romain Rolland, a witness for the prosecution at the eternal trial conducted against Goethe, had two outstanding characteristics: an adoring approach to women ("She was a woman and that's sufficient reason for loving her," he wrote about Bettina), and an enthusiastic desire to ally himself with progress (by which he meant: communist Russia and revolution). It is odd that this admirer of women at the same time praised Beethoven for his refusal to greet women. For this was what the episode in the Teplitz spa was all about, if we have understood it correctly: Beethoven, his hat pulled down over his forehead and his arms clasped behind his back, strode toward the Empress and her court, which was certainly made up of ladies as well as gentlemen. If he failed to greet them, he was an out-and-out boor! But this is hard to believe: Beethoven may have been a strange, morose character, but he was never boorish toward women! This whole story is obviously nonsense and could have been accepted and retold only because people (including, shamefully, even a novelist!) have lost all sense of reality. You will object that it is improper to probe into the authenticity of an anecdote that was obviously not intended as testimony but as allegory. Very well; let us then examine the allegory as allegory; let us ignore its origins (which we will never know exactly, anyway), let us ignore the tendentious implications that one person or another wanted to insinuate, and let us try to grasp, so to speak, its objective significance:

  What does Beethoven's deeply pulled-down hat mean? That Beethoven rejected the power of the aristocracy as reactionary and unjust, while the hat in Goethe's humble hand pleaded for keeping the world as it is? Yes, that is the generally accepted explanation, but it is indefen-

  207

  MILAN KUNDERA

  sible: just as Goethe had to create a modus vivendi for himself and his creativity, so did Beethoven in his own time; he therefore dedicated his sonatas to one prince or another and didn't even hesitate to compose a cantata in honor of the victors who gathered in Vienna after Napoleon's defeat in which the choir sings out: "May the world be again as it once used to be!"; he even went so far as to write a polonaise for the Empress of Russia, as if symbolically laying poor Poland (a Poland that thirty years later Bettina would so bravely champion) at the feet of its invader.

  Thus, if our allegorical picture shows Beethoven striding past a group of aristocrats without taking off his hat, it cannot mean that aristocrats were contemptible reactionaries while he was an admirable revolutionary, but that those who create (statues, poems, symphonies) deserve more respect than those who rule (over servants, officials, or whole nations); that creativity means more than power, art more than politics; that works of art, not wars or aristocratic costume balls, are immortal.

  (Actually, Goethe must have been thinking exactly the same thing, except that he didn't consider it useful to reveal this unpleasant truth to the masters of the world at the time, while they were still alive. He was certain that in eternity it would be they who would bow their heads first, and that was enough for him.)

  The allegory is clear, and yet it is generally misinterpreted. Those who look at this allegorical picture and hasten to applaud Beethoven completely fail to understand his pride: they are for the most part people blinded by politics, who themselves give precedence to Lenin, Guevara, Kennedy, or Mitterrand over Fellini or Picasso. Romain Rolland would surely have bowed much more deeply than Goethe, if he had encountered Stalin on a path in Teplitz.

  I5

  T

  his matter of Romain Rolland's respect for women was rather odd. Rolland, who admired Bettina simply because she was a woman ("She was a woman and that's sufficient reason for loving her"), had no admiration whatever for Christiane, who was without doubt a woman too! He considered Bettina "mad and wise" {folk etsage), "madly alive and madly cheerful" with a "tender and mad" heart, and in numerous other passages he described her as mad. And we know that for homo sentimentalis the words "madman," "mad," "madness" (which in French sound even more poetic than in other languages :fou, folle, folie) designate an exaltation of feeling freed from censorship (les delires actifs de la passion, Eluard might call it) and so are spoken with tender admiration. On the other hand, this admirer of womankind and the proletariat never mentions Christiane without linking her name, against all the rules of gallantry, with such adjectives as "jealous," "fat," "ruddy and corpulent," "importunate," and again and yet again: "fat." It is strange that this friend of womankind and the proletariat, this herald of equality and brotherhood, did not find it the least bit moving that Christiane was a former workingwoman and that Goethe exhibited quite extraordinary courage by living with her as a lover and then openly making her his wife. He had to face not only the gossip of Weimar salons but the disapproval of his intellectual friends, Herder and Schiller, who turned up their noses at her. I am not surprised that the Weimar aristocracy enjoyed Bettina's calling her a fat sausage. But I am surprised that a friend of womankind and the working class enjoyed it. Why is it that a young patrician, maliciously showing off her cultural superiority over a simple woman, was so close to him? And why is it that Christiane, who liked to drink and to dance, who did not watch

  208

  209

  MILAN KUNDERA

  her figure and grew fat quite happily, never earned the right to that divine adjective "mad" but was seen by the friend of the proletariat merely as "importunate"?

  Why did it never occur to the friend of the proletariat to elaborate the episode with the glasses into an allegory, in which a simple woman of the people rightly punished the arrogant young intellectual while Goethe, having taken his wife's part, strode proudly forward with head held high (and hatless!) against an army of aristocrats and their shameful prejudices?

  Of course, such an allegory would be no less silly than the preceding one. But the question remains: why did the friend of the proletariat and womankind chose one silly allegory and not the other? Why did he give preference to Bettina over Christiane?

  This question gets to the heart of the matter.

  The next chapter will answer it:

  210

  16

  G

  oethe urged Bettina (in one of his undated letters) to "step out of herself." Nowadays we would say that he reproached her for being egocentric. But was he justified in doing so? Who fought for the rebelling Tyrolean mountaineers, for the posthumous fame of Petofi, for the life of Mieroslawski? Was it he, or she? Who was constantly thinking of others? Who was always ready for self-sacrifice?

  Bettina. There is no doubt about it. Yet Goethe's reproach is not thereby refuted. For Bettina never stepped out of her self. No matter where she went, her self fluttered behind her like a flag. What inspired her to fight for Tyrolean mountaineers was not the mountaineers but the bewitching image of Bettina fighting for the mountaineers. What drove her to love Goethe was not Goethe but the seductive image of the child-Bettina in love with the old poet.

  Let us remember her gesture, which I called the gesture of longing fo
r immortality: first she placed her fingertips to a spot between her breasts, as if she wanted to point to the very center of what is known as the self. Then she flung her arms forward, as if she wanted to transport that self somewhere far away, to the horizon, to infinity. The gesture of longing for immortality knows only two points in space: the self here, the horizon far in the distance; only two concepts: the absolute that is the self, and the absolute that is the world. That gesture has nothing in common with love, because the other, the fellow creature, the person between these two poles (the self and the world) is excluded in advance, ruled out of the game, invisible.

  A twenty-year-old youth who joins the Communist Party or, rifle in hand, goes off to the hills to fight for a band of guerrillas is fascinated by his own revolutionary image, which distinguishes him from others

  211

  !f«|H||t

  MILAN KUNDERA

  and makes him become himself. It begins with a festering, unsatisfied love for his self, a self he wants to mark with expressive features and then send (by the gesture of longing for immortality I have already described) onto the great stage of history, under the gaze of thousands; and we know from the example of Myshkin and Nastasia Filipovna how such a keen gaze can make a soul grow, expand, get bigger and bigger until at last it rises to heaven like a beautiful, brightly lit airship.

  What makes people raise their fists in the air, puts rifles in their hands, drives them to join struggles for just and unjust causes, is not reason but a hypertrophied soul. It is the fuel without which the motor of history would stop turning and Europe would lie down in the grass and placidly watch clouds sail across the sky.

  Christiane did not suffer from hypertrophy of the soul and did not yearn to exhibit herself on the great stage of history. I suspect that she preferred to lie on her back in the grass and watch the clouds float by. (I even suspect that she knew happiness at such times, something a person with a hypertrophied soul dislikes seeing, because he is burning in the fire of his self and is never happy.) Romain Rolland, friend of progress and tears, thus did not hesitate for a moment when he had to choose between her and Bettina.